The Investing Edgeof Enterprise IT

At Ascent, we have been investing in IT security for decades. As technology platforms shift, security solutions must both shift with them as well as rise to meet a more severe threat landscape posed by today’s sophisticated cyber criminals and nation-state sponsored hackers. As recent RSA conferences have shown, the challenge – and opportunity – posed by IT security hasRead more…

This year’s RSA conference was bigger than ever with more than 40,000 attendees. San Francisco buzzed with security vendors, buyers and investors as they crowded the lobbies of hotels and coffee shops with endless meetings. Being immersed in the atmosphere at RSA was both invigorating and overwhelming. It proved that while the need for cybersecurity solutions has never been moreRead more…

Congratulations to enterprise security industry leader Blue Coat Systems on their acquisition of PerspecSys. Our portfolio company PerspecSys, an early leader in the rapidly emerging cloud data protection market, was recently acquired by security gateway leader Blue Coat Systems. This was a very savvy move by Blue Coat and it positions them well in the cloud gateway/cloud access security brokerRead more…

We love when our partners succeed. And today, we’re very pleased to offer congratulations to our portfolio company CloudLock, the leading provider of cloud cybersecurity solutions, and highlight their exemplary award recognition in the last couple weeks. Yesterday, co-founder and CEO Gil Zimmermann, was publicly named as EY Entrepreneur of the Year in New England, recognizing his excellence and extraordinaryRead more…

The vicious cyberattacks on major organizations like Target, Home Depot, eBay, JP Morgan Chase and recently, Anthem, makes one thing clear: the severity and sophistication of cyberattacks has taken a major leap forward. Having thieves steal sensitive data such as credit card information or personal identities is extremely costly, both financially and to the brands’ reputation. Yet a new breedRead more…

After 28 years and over 100 investments, we are as passionate as ever about our focus on early-stage enterprise IT venture investing and the continually changing landscape that creates new opportunities. We have created a brief video that captures the fundamentals of Ascent, and includes a few of the CEOs we have had the good fortune to work with discussingRead more…

In recent posts we’ve discussed how the shift to the cloud, the explosion of mobile usage, and the massive growth in data will help drive the next wave of productivity and economic gains for companies. But these new technologies also dramatically shif the nature of where data is, how much there is, and how it is accessed, and therefore requireRead more…

We are very pleased to have participated in another financing round for CloudLock, which on Wednesday announced a $16.5 M Series C. Launched in 2011, CloudLock now protects millions of end-users across a wide range of organizations. They were a pioneer of cloud security and we saw the promise of their vision when we led the Company’s Series B inRead more…

According to a new study this week, 41 percent of global organizations will increase their IT security budgets in 2014. The increased focus on securing corporate data and devices probably isn’t surprising to most industry onlookers, given the amount of media coverage we’ve seen recently around attacks on enterprises, not to mention Edward Snowden and the NSA. Still, the increasingRead more…

I attended two local industry events recently that highlighted the substantial gap that exists between hackers’ abilities and the average corporation’s information security defenses. While we’ve been watching the security industry closely and work with several portfolio companies in this area, it’s nonetheless unsettling how far behind the average corporation is, and how daunting the chasm is between where theyRead more…